Ninety four years ago, opera star Enrico Caruso stepped up to a microphone and sang. Only a few, specially equipped headphones picked up the signal, but it was a landmark moment: the first radio broadcast to the public.

In our age of ever-present video screens, its hard to imagine how important radio was to the life of families for decades in the 20th century. Its hard to picture our kids gathering with us around a radio, straining to catch the latest joke or sinister plot.

Actually, its not all that hard for me to imagine. We did it just the other night.

All of our children were home, including our college-age son, and we had recently returned from a trip having listened to only half of a new tape from an audio series for kids clalled Adventures in Odyssey. We are huge fans of these adventures  in fact, weve been listening to them since their debut many years ago. Our older kids have grown up with the characters; our youngest is just getting introduced. They've been a part of our life for so long, they feel like old friends. So, eager to hear the latest Odyssey doings, we settled into the living room with a boom box for our storyteller.

Cultivating listeners is hard. Most kids want the sensory punch of visuals, preferably with lots of special effects. Its hard to convince them that less can be more. But listening has its rewards. Walter Cronkite once said about the days of old-time radio stories, "Listeners were a part of the creative process." Like with reading aloud, ones mind is free to conjure up images to go with the voices. A creaky door or a creepy laugh is much more suspenseful when it is played upon the full scale of ones imagination, without the limitation of someone elses images attached to them.

Thats why I think the increase in video screens in cars is such a sad thing. Its bad enough that children dont daydream or read or talk on a long trip. Now, theyve got to have portable movies. Even in the car, stories have to be seen and not just heard.

So, back in the 1940s, families circled together around a radio, with nothing to look at but the old Philco and each other. Seems odd to us.